Model/actor/noted daughter Paris Jackson appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Monday in her first late-night interview on US television. She seemed cool, I guess.
Not very much was required of her beyond showing up, given the unchallenging nature of her host, and so that’s what she did. After showing up, she talked about little mundane details of her life—her first CD, meeting Alice Cooper, attending a High School Musical Concert that did not feature Zac Efron—and listened as Fallon read a tweet she posted of an ode to Wendy’s she wrote:
Paris Jackson is pretty—she looks kind of like a cross between early ‘80s Madonna and a girl in your high school art class. She seems remarkably calm. She is 18. She did a thing at the Grammys. She has a role on Lee Daniels’s Star, which again, doesn’t seem to require much beyond showing up:
Paris Jackson is also everywhere—on the covers of Rolling Stone and Harper’s Bazaar, on various red carpets, and in who knows what upcoming fashion spreads (she just signed with the modeling agency IMG). Clearly, there is a push happening right now to make Paris Jackson a thing, and the push needn’t be too hard because she’s inherently fascinating given her familial ties. The daughter of the King of Pop is naturally American royalty. Maybe she is an interesting person in her own right, maybe not, but it doesn’t matter that much for now. She doesn’t have to be anything, really. Her life comes with fascination built in. That combined with the years she spent years hidden from public view (sometimes literally under masks) makes her very presence in public notable.
The idea that children of celebrities are celebrities themselves isn’t new—it is, in fact, so given that Paris Jackson can show up, be chill, and create a low-key spectacle. Given how normalized fame for fame’s sake has become, I wonder what it means for the celebrity kids we’re watching now. How low will the bar be set for Blue Ivy and North West and Moroccan and Monroe to foster the fame they’ve been handed? Will they manifest what will be considered art in just standing there silently? Will the most interesting thing they do in public one night be cracking eggs on their foreheads?
And yet, I watched. She’s interesting even when she’s not. Some people just have it.